UNIFYING THE PARTY: THE OVERVIEW

UNIFYING THE PARTY: THE OVERVIEW; On 2nd Night, Unity Is Theme For Democrats

By ROBIN TONER and TODD S. PURDUM

Published: July 28, 2004

BOSTON, July 27—
With a rallying cry from one of its bright young hopes, a roar from its old liberal lion and a loving endorsement from the candidate's own outspoken wife, the Democratic Party offered up John Kerry on Tuesday night as a worthy heir to the patriots of the past, ready and able to unite a nation bitterly divided by the policies and politics of the Bush administration.

''There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America,'' said Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for the Senate from Illinois, the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan and the party's choice to deliver the keynote address. [Excerpts, Page P8.]

For all the talk of a red and blue America divided by party, Mr. Obama said, ''We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.''

The FleetCenter exploded in the kind of electric reaction and uproarious applause reserved for the birth of a political star, louder and longer than even the response to the Democrats' hometown hero, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an hour or so earlier. If Mr. Obama reached for the middle with his promise of a new kind of politics under Mr. Kerry, Mr. Kennedy spoke to the most fervent and frustrated Democratic voters, weary after four years out of power.

''In the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt inspired the nation when he said, 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,''' Mr. Kennedy declared. ''Today, we say the only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush.''

For her part, Teresa Heinz Kerry joined the effort to introduce herself and her husband to a public that still barely knows them, and declared: ''In America, the true patriots are those who dare speak truth to power. The truth we must speak now is that America has responsibilities that it is time for us accept again.''

She spoke softly but proudly affirmed her reputation for speaking her mind. She described her husband as a fighter, and added, to loud applause: ''He earned his medals the old-fashion way, by putting his life on the line for his country. No one will defend this nation more vigorously than he will -- and he will always be first in the line of fire. But he also knows the importance of getting it right.''

It was a night when the party not only paid tribute to its proud legacy as the advocate of Social Security and civil rights but also showed its striking unity and discipline in the face of the fall challenge to Mr. Bush. Its losing candidates Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun and Richard A. Gephardt ceremonially closed ranks around Mr. Kerry, and delegates approved the party's platform without the slightest hint of a fight.

Dr. Dean, who once defiantly introduced himself as representing ''the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,'' appeared on Tuesday night and declared, ''I'm Howard Dean, and I'm voting for John Kerry.'' He thanked the supporters of his insurgent campaign, but added: ''This was never about me. It was about us. It was about giving new life to our party, new energy to our democracy, and providing hope again for the greatest nation on earth.''

But Dr. Dean, who was enthusiastically greeted by the convention, had more than a bit of fight left in him, warning: ''We're not going to be afraid to stand up for what we believe. We're not going to let those who disagree with us shout us down under a banner of false patriotism.'' And in a gentle, self-deprecatory echo of his famous Iowa scream the night he lost the caucuses, he vowed, ''We're not going to give up a single voter or a single state.''

Amid a sea of delegates holding hand-lettered signs expressing their loyalty to the man who galvanized a beleaguered party last year, Valerie R. Jackson, a delegate from Atlanta and the widow of its late mayor, Maynard H. Jackson, said: ''Having Dean under this roof shows Democrats can get over family arguments. People should learn from Dean's scream that there are times to get emotional about politics.''

In another charged moment, Ron Reagan, whose Republican father died after a decade's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, said that the embryonic stem cell research President Bush has restricted offered such promise for cures to devastating diseases that ''whatever else you do, come Nov. 2, I urge you, please, cast a vote for embryonic stem cell research.'' Mr. Kerry supports such research.

With no live coverage by the broadcast networks, the proceedings Tuesday amounted to a family affair, looking back on the party's struggles over voting rights, its tumultuous primary season and its traditions of patchwork inclusion.

Peter, Paul and Mary -- older, grayer and in the case of Mary Travers clutching a cane -- urged the audience to join them in the Bob Dylan anthem that many of them sang when it was new, asking, ''How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?''

Ms. Heinz Kerry, whose convention week began with her telling a conservative journalist who had angered her to ''shove it!'' introduced herself as an immigrant who cherished the American traditions of freedom, including freedom of speech, and made a clear bid for the support of women.

''My name is Teresa Heinz Kerry, and by now I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say.'' Moments later, Ms. Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique under dictatorship, drew waves of applause by addressing the crowd in Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, then declaring: ''My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some call opinionated, is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. My only hope is that one day soon, women -- who have all earned the right to their opinions -- instead of being labeled opinionated, will be called smart and well informed, just like men.''

This is the eighth Democratic convention that Mr. Kennedy has addressed, beginning with the 1972 convention in Miami. It included a true gathering of the clan, with 90 members of his extended family gathered in the convention hall and his broader political family of traditional Democrats cheering him on.

He likened the Democrats' cause to that of the nation's earliest patriots, and Mr. Kerry to presidents from John Adams to John F. Kennedy, and added: ''Now it is our turn to take up the cause. Our struggle is not with some monarch named George who inherited the crown -- although it often seems that way.

''Our struggle is with the politics of fear and favoritism in our own time, in our own country,'' he added. ''Our struggle, like so many others before, is with those who put their own narrow interest ahead of the public interest. We hear echoes of past battles in the quiet whisper of the sweetheart deal, in the hushed promise of a better break for the better connected. We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before, and with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again and make America stronger at home and respected once more in the world.''

As Mr. Kennedy spoke, John Thomas Hogle, a delegate from Syracuse and a combat veteran supporting Mr. Kerry, described him as ''the soul of the Democratic Party.'' And when Mr. Kennedy closed, his voice catching as he invoked the lines of Tennyson -- ''my brothers loved 'to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield''' -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, seated in the gallery, pursed her lips and exhaled sharply as if to compose herself and the sound system played ''Still the One.''

In a show of party discipline, Democrats unanimously approved their platform Tuesday, a process that has often exposed divisions and fault lines but this year served largely to highlight its single-minded focus on defeating Mr. Bush.

While the party's activists have been heavily opposed to the war with Iraq, the platform echoes Mr. Kerry's position that ''we cannot afford to fail at peace'' in the region and ''must do the hard work of engaging the world's major political powers in this mission.'' The platform describes Mr. Bush's foreign policy as ''dangerously ineffective,'' asserts the government could do more to protect the nation from terrorism and calls for a new emphasis on alliance building.

Photos: ''My name is Teresa Heinz Kerry, and by now I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say,'' the candidate's wife said last night. (Photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times); ''Whatever else you do,'' Ron Reagan said last night, ''come Nov. 2, I urge you, please, cast a vote for embryonic stem cell research.'' (Photo by Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)(pg. P2)